Cindy Brown Austin

For the past 25 years, Hartford native and licensed minister, Cindy Brown Austin, has written and lectured about the tragedies and triumphs of urban New England life. Raised in the Hartford housing projects, Cindy is best known regionally for her editorials, columns and cover-stories written for The Hartford Courant’s Sunday magazine, Northeast. A recipient fellow of the CT Commission on the Arts and a runner-up in Ebony Magazine’s annual fiction-writing contest, Cindy’s first novel, By the Rivers of Babylon, received critical acclaim when it was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007.

Cindy is a survivor of what she calls an “urban holocaust.” Her mission, she believes, is to report the crisis occurring in the lives of inner-city children.

Her latest book, “Cinders; Stories of an Inner-city Survivor,” is a Connecticut coming of age memoir that examines the struggles of being a black child in a white world.

Cindy currently lives in Windsor with her husband, David. She has four grown daughters, two grandchildren and a passion for street ministry.

Cindy is at work on a collection of short stories and on the sequel to her first novel.